Yes, there was real apathy in the Perl community - an attitude that Perl is a better language than PHP so why should we lower ourselves to compete. The endless MOP debates didn't help either and for those waiting for Perl to sort it out Ruby was there with everything they needed. Moose, Moo, Mouse - talk about fiddling while Rome burns. Perl was in no state to compete with Rails' elegantly-packaged Omakase. Another factor which affected Perl 5 in the mid-2000s was the diversion of resources to Perl 6 when Perl 5 had 3 sharks (PHP, Ruby & Python) circling around it. Meanwhile newsagents' shelves were full of dedicated PHP & MySQL magazines and the more generic web dev mags invariably had an advanced section featuring sites buillt with PHP & MySQL. It was already game over for Perl.